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The Dying of the Third-Party Dream

Of all the strange images of this strange campaign, I find myself particularly struck by this vision: Mitt Romney, pacing alone in one of his many houses, his angst evident in his faintly mussed-up hair, placing pleading phone calls to Republican politicians asking them to run as a third-party candidate against Donald Trump.

That bizarre, existential one-act play — “Conversations About Trump,” opening Off Broadway, with Josh Brolin as Romney and the voice of William H. Macy as John Kasich — is apparently where the quest for a conservative alternative to Trump and Hillary Clinton ran into a wall.

In the end, there isn’t going to be a convention walkout, the Republican Party isn’t going to fracture or go the way of the Whigs, and the elite constituency for a third-party run turned out to consist of a collection of pundits, a handful of strategists and the 2012 Republican nominee.

Which is why Romney made those calls in vain. When the idea was first kicked around months ago, the main case for a third-party candidate was that the G.O.P. could actually benefit institutionally from an independent anti-Trump campaign — that it would help rescue down-ballot Republicans by giving anti-Trump conservatives a reason to turn out, and it might even help save the Republican brand from being permanently tarnished, permanently Trumpified.

But since then the party’s elite has moved to reconcile with Trump — grudgingly and miserably in many cases, with a few notable holdouts, but on a sufficient scale that an independent alternative now seems like something that almost nobody in the party is actually pining for. And asking a prominent politician to start a foredoomed bid to save the Republican Party’s honor when the party itself doesn’t seem to be asking for a savior — well, that’s a hard sell, and it’s not particularly surprising that nobody is answering the call.

There’s a plausible case that this is actually a good thing even for anti-Trump conservatives. A third-party candidate would have a vanishingly small chance of actually winning, and the idea that the election could be somehow thrown to the House is exceedingly far-fetched. So it would most likely be a pure protest vote — and the more protest votes such a candidate won, the stronger would be the sense of betrayal among Trump supporters, the more powerful the “dolchstoss” narrative that Trump could muster after his defeat.

Thus it makes more sense, the argument goes, for the G.O.P.’s dissidents to imitate anti-Goldwater Republicans and anti-McGovern Democrats (who didn’t rally to splinter candidates), show some confidence in their own prophecy of Trump’s November defeat and work to rebuild their party afterward without the stigma of having allegedly stabbed Trump in the back.

On a strategic level this case mostly adds up. But on a moral level I have some modest doubts.

Set aside the gaming-out of post-November scenarios and simply ask the question: Is it a good thing for the country, or for that matter for the world, that our only options in November are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? It’s clear that the answer for a great many people remains a resounding “heaven help us, no.”

By “people” here I don’t just mean Bill Kristol or Bernie Sanders’s campaign team or anyone else with a professional stake in stopping Trump or Clinton. I mean the extraordinary numbers of Americans who regard both parties’ likely nominees with a mix of fear, exhaustion and disgust, and whose entirely reasonable sentiments will make Trump-versus-Clinton a battle of the two most reviled nominees in modern presidential history.

Partisan polarization is a powerful force, and with time most people in this unhappy camp will find reasons to justify a vote for either Madame Hillary or Il Donald. But if you believe that either choice risks too much, for the republic or the world — or if you merely think that Trump risks too much and that in a head-to-head race he might find a way to win — then by leaving the voters with only those options you are effectively choosing to leave grave evils unopposed. (Or opposed only by whomever the Libertarian Party chooses to nominate — maybe a Gary Johnson-Bill Weld ticket, or maybe a cybersecurity guru who spent recent years entangled in a murder investigation in Belize.)

I suspect that a political culture that placed a higher priority on honor and self-sacrifice, and a lower one on always being savvy and keeping your options open and thinking several moves ahead, would have already produced a #NeverTrump independent candidate for exactly this reason: Because it would seem to politicians in such a culture like the right and necessary thing to do, regardless of its prospects for success.

I also suspect that deep in his Mormon heart this is how Mitt Romney thinks, which explains his lonely #NeverTrumpism, during the primary campaign and on the phone with unwilling suitors in the last few weeks.

But if he thinks that way, then somewhere still deeper he must know that out of the (thin) roster of potential independent candidates only one name really makes any sense for the role — and that’s his own.

But only Romney has the combination of universal name recognition, sustained campaign experience and fund-raising prowess that you would need — especially at this all-but-too-late date — to run an independent campaign that was something other than a joke.

Not a joke … but still an all-but-certain loser, which is why Romney seems to be ruling it out. If it’s a hard thing to ask any politician to run against the party’s wishes, it’s particularly hard to ask a man who’s already lost two campaigns for president to accept a third go-round with that same ending basically guaranteed.

But as last acts go, it would be an admirable one. And with all due respect to strategy and savvy, I’m sorry that in this year of Republican dishonor we won’t get to see it happen.